Rethinking cancer survivorship on social media: A phenomenological study of embodiment, online visibility, and the content object-body.

Studies of cancer survivorship and social media have treated survivors as audiences of online cancer content, examining how cancer survivors receive support and information from what others post. This study, in contrast, shifts attention from the consumption of online cancer content to its creation. In this article, we employed a theory-led phenomenological approach to examine how creating cancer content on social media did not merely represent survivorship, but - in participants' accounts - substantially transformed their embodied experience of illness. Drawing on interviews conducted between January and May 2026 with 18 cancer content creators in the United States and Europe, findings revealed three ways participants described content creation as reshaping how they lived with cancer. 1) Becoming recognizable showed how participants described their own public cancer brands as becoming part of their self-understanding. 2) Becoming believable showed how participants - who reported that followers doubted whether they really had cancer - came to experience visible bodily changes and clinical spaces as evidence that could prove their illness was real. 3) Becoming valuable revealed how participants perceived suffering and medical crisis as drawing greater audience attention than recovery - creating a paradox in their experience of healing. Namely, as participants recovered and audience attention appeared to decline, some participants came to feel less valuable. Building on these findings, this study demonstrates that social media is not only a repository of cancer information, but a lived cancer environment in which survivorship itself takes shape.